Running 2010 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament thread

In my experience, Teddy Sports Bar is usually a loudmouth dunce who only wants his team to win so he can talk smack to his buddies who root for other teams.

Fact: Calipari's teams reached two Final Fours.

Fact: Those teams also committed rules violations involving cash from an agent and academic fraud. Those aren't stupid NCAA rules. Those are serious matters.

Does this diminish Calipari's coaching? No. Does it mean he's a dangerous man to hire if you want your school to stay out of trouble?

Absolutely. And reality doesn't get any more objective than that.

 

Those are fair and accurate statements, all of them.

 

Oh, I don't know. Maybe because they were found to have violated NCAA rules and have been stripped of all their wins for the season.

 

Yes, a team with FIVE NBA first round draft picks, including the No. 1 overall pick and another top 5 pick, in this year's draft. Doesn't take a whole helluva lot of genius to get a team to "mesh quickly" when you're putting a future NBA starting lineup on the floor against college kids every night.

Calipari's a magnificent unparralleled recruiter, no doubt, and his players sure seem to love playing for him. But I've never been much impressed by his coaching skills. His teams always have bizarrely undisciplined shot selection (like taking THIRTY TWO three point attempts in that WVU game, what the hell was that about?), and he ALWAYS seems to go down in tourney games due to the exact same free throw shooting, three point shooting and strategic blunder problems every year. Izzo he ain't.

 

Honestly, the free throws were reason number four or five why they bit the dust.

Number one - Joe fing Mazzulla.

 

Or, more specifically, the failure of Kentucky's defenders to pick up Mazulla on all those uncontested waltzes to the hoop.

But I think No.1 was 32 three point attempts. That team had the best low post scorers in the entire country, the best guys at driving the ball in the entire country, and was a shitty three point shooting team. So, hey, here's the game plan: let's fork up ill-advised three pointers early in the shot clock on every other possession. A 4-32 performance later, they've lost. What a shocker.

Credit also goes to the failure to make any defensive adjustments to stop that little curl WVU kept getting all those easy baskets off of.

And, as with every Calipari team in March, the shitty free throw shooting showed up to do its part as usual.

 

Spot on, and I give the Huggy Bear a lot of credit for that game plan of dropping the wing of the 1-3-1 down to double Cousins and clog the lane, thus daring that three.

 

For everyone who thinks the world is waiting with baited breath to see if Butler can pull it off:

Two guys talking at my breakfast spot at the table next to me just now: "Baylor? Butler? Is it Baylor? One of those two. Butler maybe? I'm not sure."

 

Dude, you're in Ann Arbor, they don't even know what basketball is.

Take a straw pall, 90 percent of campus doesn't know John Wall from John Stockton.

 

I think the TV ratings would be really interesting if it were Butler vs. Duke. The ultimate David vs. Goliath national title matchup. And if it bombed, from then on any time some casual fan in sports tells me how much they don't want a big-name team to win, I plan on calling them on it. (FYI, I'm saying this in jest, but the point stands)

 

At least The Dwarf hasn't pounded out another Monument To Human Stupidity/Flippin' Five piece that I've seen,
this year.

 

The planned Fab Five Reunion last year at a Detroit casino during the semifinal games kind of collapsed in flames. Read story after story about it for 3-4 days, then it all fell apart. What a shame.